Jive is pleased to announce several significant updates for our mobile offering:

All new Android 3.0

Jive has released an entirely new Android app targeted at desk-less workers to ensure they can access corporate communications on the fly and also collaborate, communicate and connect with their colleagues. This native app allows users to easily create rich content such as documents and messages, @mention information and people, as well as browse content and streams with a swipe. The Android app is built on top of our new, public Android SDK which allows organizations to develop their own custom apps. Get the app here.

Language and iOS Updates

To support our global customers, both the Android 3 and iOS apps are now available in the same languages that our desktop version supports; all 20 of them! The iOS app has been tuned for faster performance and further enhanced with swiping to mark messages (un)read (similar to the mechanism seen in many consumer apps). The update for the iOS app is available from iTunes.

Continuing the evolution of Jive for iPad beta, we have a new version now available from the App Store. This update introduces significant new functionality to further our mission to make the iPad the best enterprise productivity tool for communication and collaboration.

New productivity features.

Explore: get the latest trending content, people, and places at a glance in the visually rich new Explore screen.

Follow people, places, and content to enhance your custom attention streams and track what matters, right from the iPad.

Write, edit, and publish Blog Posts.

Quick access to your authored and recent content from your picture in the main navigation.

View and engage with Shares in your Inbox.

Speed is a feature.

We've made significant performance improvements in this release and fixed a ton of the early beta bugs.

Built for the enterprise.

Jive for iPad now has out of the box support for standard SAML SSO.

Please continue to share your feedback and stay tuned for much more coming as we continue to build towards the 1.0 GAlater this year.

Apple was nice and approved our update much faster than anticipated. Please update your app to v0.5.1 for the following benefits:

Easily import content into a Jive document via "open in" from other applications. For example, if you open a PDF or XLS from Box or Mail and tap the icon in the upper right you'll see the "Open in Jive" option. Selecting that will import the file into a Jive document as an attachment.

Enabled the ability to resize images when editing content. From Edit/Create mode just tap the image, tap and hold any of the blue dots framing the image, and drag your finger to resize. You can also tap & hold the entire image to move it to a new location.

Images in status updates are now displayed inline. Multiple images are shown in a filmstrip-like design which scrolls when the horizontal limit is reached.

Last June or so Jive made a big bet on the iPad. It began with Jive Present, an app focused on sales enablement, and today continues with the first release of a native Jive iPad app! The mandate for this effort is to ultimately deliver the full Jive experience. In essence, the new way to work on the new device for work.

What did we build?

It started with an SDK. We have a great set of APIs which provides the underpinnings for everything we do on the client side. Since we were starting from scratch, we took the time to build an iOS SDK as the basis for it both for our own benefit and as something we can open source. It's going out on GitHub and will be promoted on Jive Developers: Home soon!

The Design team took a decidedly user-centric approach. Since people often use their iPad for a mix of business and personal use, we wanted to stress the "it's all about you" aspects. It starts with the "Me" page with all of your streams, content, people, and places in one central place and will evolve into personalization down the road.

We also believe in not re-inventing the wheel, especially the beautiful ones in iOS, so we incorporated many of iOS's common elements into our app. For example, our Inbox functions much like Mail on the iPad with the familiar controls for editing and toggling read state. This was done thoughtfully to make the app intuitive and recognizable: Jive's core constructs + iOS's interactions makes for a happy marriage.

We also made it a goal to not just be an app for consumption. It must be great at creating content too. To that end we wrote an RTE for inline mentioning of people/places/content, content editing, and basic formatting.

I will post the app binary to the JC in the Jive for Mobile space. This is a new mode of distribution we have been testing with some customers who have internal enterprise app stores. The benefit is it allows the app icon to be branded and enables distribution via an internal app management system. Going forward, I will be updating the app in the JC on a quarterly basis.

What's coming next? Some highlights:

By the end of next week

We already have an update in the queue for Apple to approve. Tons of bug fixes and performance improvements.

Announcing version 2.0, the next generation of Jive Mobile, built on the latest Jive platform.

Performance is job #1 in mobile. When connected to Jive Cloud or Jive 6.0.1+, Jive's redesigned app is built for speed.

Specifically:

The app is now 50% faster at startup, switches streams immediately and displays content more quickly.

The design has been enhanced for efficiency and improved usability. Navigate quickly with a slide-out menu accessed by a tap or a swipe, a fixed header with Inbox controls and pull to refresh.

Find what matters most to you through new features, such as:

Accessing custom streams on the go.

Posting images in your discussions and status updates.

Receiving Announcements from the community in your mobile inbox.

Redesigned, richer user profiles.

Scrolling wide tables horizontally without needing to open in an external browser.

All Jive Mobile users still get the great features of previous versions:

Discover something of interest to share? Say it with more than just words by including a picture in your status update.

Keep up with the pulse of your Jive community by effortlessly browsing through your followed activity stream, replying to discussions, commenting on documents & blog posts and giving some praise via Likes.

Have a question during a sales call, on the train home, or out to dinner? Quickly start up a discussion with colleagues.

Note, multiple communities can be registered within the app. The appropriate version of the app will be served based on the community selected.

The secure passcode feature is currently unsupported in version 2.0. Any customers utilizing that feature will be directed to the previous version of the app until the feature is supported. Currently ETA is May '13. Please note, this does NOT mean that users have to refrain from upgrading to the 2.0 version of Jive Mobile if their community uses this feature. The app will respond properly and serve the version of the app which does support passcode.

In addition to the bug fixes mentioned inRelease Notes for Mobile Plugin Version 5.0.4, the major highlight for most mobile community admins is the introduction of push notifications of What Matters: Communications (aka "Inbox") items for iPhone native app users!

To enable push notifications, on your Jive 5.0.1+ community, just upgrade your community to plugin 5.0.4. The latest version of the Jive iPhone app will automatically allow the user to register for push notifications if desired. As with all iOS push notifications, control over whether to receive the push notifications and how they are displayed in the iPhone is completely under control of the user.

Although the version of the Jive iPhone app currently in the App Store does work with push notifications, it is not our official release for push notification support. We plan to release an update by June 1, which resolves a lot of bugs, and will be Jive's first fully supported push-notification release. Therefore, we recommend planning to put this version of the plugin into production on or after June 1, 2012.

Frequently Asked Questions for Push Notifications

Can I customize exactly which items get pushed (e.g., email watches)?

Sorry, no. Only WM:Communications items are supported at this time.

Why is there a delay between when something actually happens on my community and when I receive the push notification?

In order to prevent overwhelming a loaded Jive instance, we poll for new push activity every 5 minutes (configurable via system property). If the system is under load, it may take even longer than 5 minutes for new activity to get pushed out.

I just received a large number of push alerts; why is my badge count much smaller?

The badge count corresponds to the unread WM: Communications count, which is "rolled up" -- i.e., if there are 20 new replies to 1 discussion, your unread count is still just 1. However, in order to provide the greatest fidelity with what is going on in the community, we attempt to send a push alert for each of those 20 replies.

How can I make push notifications less intrusive?

If you are on a very active community and running iOS 5, you can make push notifications a bit less "pushy". On your iPhone, go to Settings > Notifications > Jive. Set the Alert Style to Banners and Sounds to Off. Unfortunately, it is not possible on iOS for an application to designate default push notification settings.

What about push on Android?

A native Android application and push notifications for Android are under active development... stay tuned!

How can I configure push notifications?

There are two system properties for managing push notifications, which will have effect only when Mobile Plugin 5.0.4 is installed:

jive.mobile.pushTask - set this to false to disable push notifications on your community. No restart is required.

jive.mobile.pushTask.timer - set this to a milliseconds value to determine how often the plugin looks for new activity to push. The default value is 300000 milliseconds, or 5 minutes. After changing this value, you must restart the Jive community before it will take effect.

I'm happy to report that the latest native version of Jive Mobile is available in iTunes! This post describes how to set up the new app and addresses frequently asked questions. Get the app, check it out, post questions and comments as you have them. Thanks!

What's available?

The latest, native iPhone Jive app. You can now use a native iPhone app to access any community enabled for the new mobile module: 4.5.6, 5.0.1, internal, external, whatever. What's more, with this one, single app you can toggle between multiple Jive communities!

What updates are available in this native version?

In addition to all the features you've gotten used to with the latest Jive Mobile app, you can now

Fire up your app instantly and use it with the iPhone's fast app switching – so it's easy to jump from our app to your calendar, Mail, Safari, etc. and back again.

What about HTML5 Mobile Web? Do you still support that approach?

This does NOT mean that we're abandoning our HTML5 Mobile Web app approach. In fact, you'll see that this app is based on the mobile web experience. That's by design as it gives us the best of both worlds: speed of Mobile Web development and advanced functionality such as camera access for native app development. It opens up the possibility of more cool native-dependent stuff such as push notifications and more … so stay tuned.

What Jive communities support this new, native app?

This app will work for any Jive community enabled for the new mobile module running Jive 4.5.6+ or 5.0.1+ (for both internal and external communities).

We have enabled the Jive Mobile app for this Jive Community and turned on automatic redirection from supported devices. What this means is that if you're on a supported Android device, iPhone, or BlackBerry and click a link from a community email or otherwise follow a deep link such as from a mobile web search you will automatically be directed to mobile app. No more pinching & zooming or hard to tap links! Of course you can also bookmark or save the app to your homescreen for easy repeat access:

We released a minor update today to the Jive Mobile app. Don't worry; more substantive features are coming soon but we decided to do a quick release to address some issues.

To make international dialing easier the "+" characters are no longer stripped from phone numbers on profile pages

Share via email now works even if shared content title contains an ampersand ("&") character

UI for commenting on content no longer shows the subject line of the last discussion you replied to (note that comments were still always posted to the right location) - FYI John Schwiller , we were able to reproduce this eventually and put in the fix. Thank you for reporting it!

We've also added some smarter manifest handling so that iPhone home screen bookmark users should get changes as they are released, without having to do the "quit/relaunch" dance. There are also a variety of small UI fixes and enhancements, such as improved form layout in landscape mode.

Following fast on the recent additions to Jive Mobile of @ mentioning and Discussion creation comes an improved way to access content within a Place (space, social group, project). This afternoon we released the following new features:

A redesigned activity stream layout including the Place container names to provide more context to the user when scanning for relevant topics.

When the user views a piece of content, the Place name at the top is now a link to the Place-filtered view of content.

We added Places as a third tab of results within Search.

Please note that some devices aggressively cache the app so you may have to launch it a few times before receiving the update. This is especially true for those of you who have saved the app to an iPhone homescreen.

I'm very happy to announce that after traffic dies down this evening we will be releasing a significant set of new functionality to Jive Mobile! Much of this is in direct response to requests from you, our early adopters, and is evidence of more good things to come.

Discussion Creation

Now instead of just status updates you are able to create a discussion in a Place and optionally mark it as a question.

Places are found via Search and we will store a list of recently selected Places to make it easy to access the ones frequently used.

@ Mentioning of Users

Anywhere you can contribute content (status updates, discussions, replies, and comments) you can now @ mention users.

Two methods: type @username (for example, typing @brian.gil would create a mention to me) or tap the @ button and search for the user. Like we do with Places we'll store a list of the recently selected people found via search.

View Content in a Place

Now when you encounter a link to a Place in the app, it will no longer kick you out into the full desktop UI. Instead, we will present a list of recent content in that Place within the app. This is just the beginning of more to come in the area of browsing Places so stay tuned!

We also made a bunch of behind the scenes enhancements. For example, you may notice a marked improvement in the responsive of actions such as tapping "Like". Also, for those of you who have disabled status updates in your community we are now able to honor that preference in Jive Mobile.

There have been a few questions lately on the Jive Community's mobile experience and I wanted to provide a brief update:

The Jive Community will upgrade to Jive 5 in August. The mobile app is available today for 4.5.6 but Jive has opted to jump straight into Jive 5 for the Jive Community, hence the delay on being able to use the latest mobile experience here on our community. Stay tuned to the Jive Community Blog for upgrade information.

Please note that we will have a Jive 5 compatible version of Jive Mobile on 6/30 when Jive 5 launches.

The app is currently delivered via the browser as a mobile web app rather than a native app which requires download from the app store. That is especially useful for external communities such as this one as this approach allows for the mobile optimized experience to reach all users, not just those who opt to download the app in advance. Once the app is launched, we will make sure everyone can experience it by automatically redirecting users into the app when visiting from a supported mobile device. Of course, we will also publish the URL for those who wish to access it directly.